Session 2

In this session, in addition to the screening, the filmmakers will briefly present aspects of the production process of their films.

They Speak Too
Anna de Guia-Eriksson

Spain, 2020, 38 min, DCP, colour-B&W, Spanish


Camera: Jessica Y. Lee. Editor: Humberto Vallejo Cunillera. Sound: Juliana Príncipe Salazar, Sofía García Broca, Pablo Lillo Aguilar. Producer: Mariana Sánchez Bueno

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the first circumnavigation of the world, a mission set in motion by the Portuguese explorer Fernando de Magallanes and completed by the Basque navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano, whose figures are at the centre of the celebrations. Is the outcome of this exploit also being celebrated? In They Speak Too Anna de Guia-Eriksson gives body and scenery to the work entitled Black Henry by the Filipino poet, Luis H. Francia, bringing to life scenes from the work in specific locations of Donostia-San Sebastian, Pasai and Getaria (the birthplace of Elcano), places that bear a direct relationship with the colonial consequences of this journey that left behind a trail of death and destruction. The filmmaker stops in those streets frequented by people out for a Sunday stroll and reads out loud a Spanish translation of the text that imagines the reactions to the first arrival of Magallanes, from the Philippines. She is surrounded by passers-by who look at her as they go on their way, as if she were a foreign body, as if the Philippines had not been colonised by Spain for centuries and centuries, at the same time as Latin America. Stopping in front of the traces of a version of history made in stone and concrete, de Guia-Eriksson gradually progresses, scene after scene, in this plot that imagines the possible conversations and decisions taken by each of the antagonistic groups taking part in the first exchange, one led by Humabón (then Don Carlos) and the other by Lapulapu (who would organise the resistance that led to the death of Magallanes. They Speak Too interrupts the course of the official history, the circumnavigation of the world and the figure of Elcano, and questions the place that the Basque territory has had in the imperialist quest that subdued entire populations for centuries, by staging at a distance a conversation on events, whose glories are being celebrated but whose consequences have been ignored.

Lucía Salas